Hiring for any staff position in your church is a very important task. When you look at candidates, there are important factors to consider beyond experience or skill. For most positions, you’ll want to consider character, cultural alignment with your church, theological positions, and many other things. In order to interview successfully, we recommend you use a hiring rubric. Hiring rubrics are a great way to evaluate a candidate holistically and avoid the pitfall of focusing on one major strength or weakness in each person.
Naturally, as people, we have a tendency to zero in on the strengths or weaknesses of our interview candidates. With a hiring rubric, we can see their overall competency and whether or not they are a good fit for this role specifically. Here is how to use hiring rubrics for church staffing positions:
1. Define the Job Requirements
Each role in your church may look a little different. What are the requirements and expectations for this role? Are there specific experience or education expectations? Are there specific skills you’d like a candidate to be excellent in? Identify and define the job requirements so you can begin to determine the categories for evaluation on the hiring rubric. Remember that you may be able to do a church-wide hiring rubric that applies to all positions in your church, or you may find that you need one for each individual role. By starting with the job requirements, you can answer the question, “Does my current rubric work for this role?”
2. Identify Relevant Competencies or Categories
After you’ve determined the job requirements, identify the relevant competencies to review in your interviews. Are you hiring a pastor? A production manager? An administrative assistant? Whatever the role may be, there will be significant parts of the job that matter most. The core competencies will set up the main evaluation points in your rubric. These are the non-negotiable elements that must be considered.
3. Create a Scoring Metric
Now, you need to establish a scoring metric. Give your team a clear scoring metric for clarity and understanding in this part of the process. You don’t want one interviewer to provide 1s as the best score and the next to provide 5s as the best score. Keep it consistent and clear for all members of your interviewing team. Are there certain metrics that are more significant or valuable? Perhaps you can score those with a higher weight in the overall score. No matter what you decide regarding a metric, it must be clear, easy to understand, and simple. This doesn’t need to complicate the process, but instead, using a hiring metric for your church staffing positions should simplify your process.
4. Define Interview Questions
Now that your rubric and criteria are defined, develop a list of interview questions. Make sure you write your questions with your rubric in mind. You want the questions to help you identify and uncover your evaluation criteria. Additionally, this is a great opportunity to have your committee chime in. What types of questions do they want to ask the candidates? What are the things most important to them? This will help you identify what parts of the rubric still need representation in your list of questions.
When you think about the interview questions, use your core values as a platform. What is most important in your church? Those core values make a great backdrop for your interview questions.
5. Conduct Interviews with a Team or Committee
When you get to the interview stage, conduct the interviews with a committee or multiple people. Group interviews paired with a hiring rubric give you a healthy, well-rounded perspective on each candidate. Using a hiring rubric will allow all of your interviewers to view each candidate objectively.
I’ve been a part of group interviews that utilize hiring rubrics. This approach has a lot of strength because the hiring rubric scoring process makes the experience more objective.
6. Consider What’s Said and What’s Not Said
During the interview process, pay attention to what the candidate says. Do they give perfect answers only? Do they share vulnerably? Are they open and honest about their failures or weaknesses? Are they open about their current struggles? This step cannot be skipped. Use the hiring rubric to identify some of those characteristics.
You may want to introduce assessments to uncover the skill competencies of different candidates. They may say they have years of experience in an area, but an assessment will reveal the true extent of their experience.
7. Evaluate All Candidates
Now, you’ll want to use your hiring rubric to determine the top candidate(s). Who stuck out, and who scored exceptionally high? Who surprised you by scoring much lower than you expected? While a hiring rubric can help you narrow down top candidates and the best hiring options, it can also help you find the gaps in your interview experience. At times, we can conduct interviews that feel amazing, but when you really evaluate the person on paper, you realize they had a lot of charisma but are lacking in other important areas. Cover all of your bases and evaluate the candidates with your hiring committee or the group of interviewers.
After conducting interviews and assessing candidates, schedule a post-interview assessment meeting with your interview committee. You can use this meeting to discuss each person’s impression of a candidate, compare scores, and talk through any red flags. This meeting is really critical in your process because it helps bring all the perspectives to one meeting. Now, you can move towards a unified decision with many voices and viewpoints considered.
8. Choose the Best Fit
You’ve completed interviews and used a hiring rubric for your church staffing positions. Now what? It’s time to make a choice about the best candidate for the job. The hiring rubric will give you an objective view of each candidate. You cannot simply apply the rubric as the deciding factor. Now it’s time to use the hiring rubric, your own prayer, and discernment to choose the best fit for your church.
Hiring in the church can be an overwhelming process. Often, the candidates wanting to be considered are members of your church. They’re people you know personally and those who are already engaged in your community. It can be overwhelming to have to make a decision because you don’t want to hurt feelings or cause division or tension. That’s why we’ve provided these steps on how to use hiring rubrics for church staffing positions. The rubrics will help remove the personal elements and give you an unbiased, objective perspective on every candidate to help you identify the best person for the role.
